Always On My Mind Podcast: The Eye of the Storm

I started recording this one from the minivan.

Because I was already overstimulated at 8am and I needed to be somewhere quiet. Which felt exactly right for an episode about overwhelm.

Constant forward motion. Whether I am crawling or I am sprinting, I am not stopping.
Nicole Doria MS CPT

So here we go

2022 was a mountaintop year. I finished a decade long weight loss journey, stepped on a bodybuilding stage two weeks before my 41st birthday, and mentally ended my diet for good after that. Not just physically. Because there are years, sometimes decades, where we are not physically dieting but we are mentally doing it … circling in guilt and shame and starting over. I was done with all of it.

And then December happened. And 2023 became a pruning year.

I want you to understand what I mean by that. In the loving space of healing, pruning is violent. It comes through disruption and boundary creation and conflict and hard conversations. Jesus called us to be peacemakers, not peacekeepers. It is a table flipping kind of healing.

Every single category of my life got pruned that year. Professional. Personal. Relational. All of it at once. And somewhere in the middle of it I hit the kitchen floor and cried out and said I need something. Because the overwhelm was taking me down and I had never actually built the practice of regulating my emotions before that point.

So I went looking. And I found a visualization practice that I have been using ever since.

It starts with a hurricane. And a breath.

With love, Coach Nik